South Park: The Fractured But Whole Devs Talk Design, Delays, and Next Game

For a company with dozens of studios around the world and massive franchises like Assassin’s Creed and the Tom Clancy games, it would seem like there’s little place for risk in such a big organization. But that’s just what Ubisoft San Francisco, the studio behind Rocksmith and South Park: The Fractured But Whole, prides itself on delivering within Ubisoft’s lineup.

“If we were making the next Far Cry or another Assassin's Creed, people would say, ‘Why are you making it in San Francisco,’” Ubisoft SF head and South Park Executive Producer Nao Higo told IGN with a laugh. “You already have great studios in the rest of the world, in a lot cheaper locations…. We have to be different and take chances, take risks, and do something that maybe the larger organization would shy away from dedicating 1,000 people to work on.”

Exit Theatre Mode

Higo, speaking along with South Park Game Director Jason Schroeder to IGN, described the studio’s viewpoint as a “start-up mentality,” one in which risks can be taken with a team that began as 20 in 2009 and has now reached nearly 100. Those risks are inherent in Ubisoft SF's DNA, going all the way back to its debut efforts breaking into the music scene with Rocksmith.

“When we first started to talk even internally about Rocksmith, and people were saying ‘You guys are crazy, why are you doing this? Don't you know Rock Band and Guitar Hero are at the height of their popularity?’ We know that we had to be different and have that risk, and know what we're up against. But also we played it really smart,” Higo said, speaking specifically to budgetary limitations and the decision to give the game a unique teaching focus.

Starting in 2009 as, according to Higo, simply an office meant to work on game prototypes, Higo and Studio Design Director Paul Cross staffed up the team for Rocksmith with design experts in various fields, not just music gaming.

"So when we made that transition into making South Park, all it meant was then supplementing that team with additional experts on making RPGs and RPG systems on top of the people that we already had," Higo said of Ubisoft SF's growth.

Exit Theatre Mode

And in moving onto South Park, Ubisoft SF took what it learned from Rocksmith and Rocksmith 2014 and applied it to The Fractured But Whole. Namely, learning how to work within a specific project and Ubisoft SF's limitations and giving each game a clear focus.

Learning From Limitations

“South Park in the same way [as Rocksmith], we had to approach it differently from traditional ways, because we knew that if we were going to build all the content for South Park, it would have been impossible for us,” Higo said.

“None of us had worked at South Park for 10 to 19 years….So there's nobody in the world that's as fast as making South Park stuff as South Park,” Schroeder said.

“

...There's nobody in the world that's as fast as making South Park stuff as South Park."

But in working so much with an outside team, and South Park co-creator Trey Parker writing the game, Ubisoft SF also had to find a way to make their disparate schedules and divergent ideas come together. The team found common ground in the game’s combat, which upgrades the original’s turn-based gameplay to include a grid-based system, thanks to a night of board games.

“I think Trey saw a way of building common ground and said ‘Why don’t you come over to my house to play board games,’” Schroeder explained. “We played Star Wars: Imperial Assault — Ken Strickland, our lead designer, me, and Trey and a couple of other people from his staff. And all of a sudden...we were able to have a unified design language and jargon based off of board games and our common understanding of our campaign.”

Exit Theatre Mode

And as the two companies synced up on the development of the game — South Park’s infamous production schedule meant time day-by-day to talk to Parker and the team could prove tough — Ubisoft SF faced challenges of its own. Chief among them was learning to ignore their better game design instincts to make for a more authentic, funnier experience.

“We had to get [the Ubi SF team] in this mindset where comedy matters maybe more than perfect game design philosophy. Timing matters,” Schroeder said. “So it becomes a little bit like people have to fight their experience, their instincts sometimes….This is totally a good system. But it’s not that funny.”

“

This is totally a good system. But it’s not that funny."

Learning the craft of comedy offered the team one of its most difficult challenges, but Higo explained having "master craftsmen" of comedy like Parker and Matt Stone made for such a compelling opportunity. Learning how to refine The Fractured But Whole's comedic timing, as well as how that played into game elements like combat and exploration, led to plenty of iteration during development.

Delaying for a Better, Funnier Experience

Of course, The Fractured But Whole’s production ran into several delays. Those delays, Higo and Schroeder explained, came from the team’s desire to have the game live up to the quality both they and South Park Studios strived for, which can be difficult given the source material's push for relevancy.

“

Mathematically, it works, but in terms of the comedy, in terms of the feel, in terms of the pacing, it just didn't work."

“Late in the production cycle we were looking at the game and we're saying ‘OK, is this going to really be the quality that we're proud to ship it with?’ Talking with South Park, we decided collectively that nope, we need to keep refining it,” Higo said.

The Fractured But Whole’s structure is built around so many unique moments, though, so entire sections — and the accompanying assets — had to be redone.

“That [refinement] meant changes to the story, which means we have to remake entire missions, or just throw away missions that were pretty far along,” Higo said. “Mathematically, it works, but in terms of the comedy, in terms of the feel, in terms of the pacing, it just didn't work.”

“I think for us and for Ubisoft, the folks in charge care about games that matter and games that are good,” Schroeder said, noting they had the support of Ubisoft management to take more time and make a game they were proud of.

“A lot of times, we get so precious about what we make that it's hard to let go. But sometimes you have to let go for the greater good of making a better experience overall,” Higo explained as one of the studio's major lessons learned in South Park's development.

“I think hiring flexible people and building a team of people that are interested in going beyond necessarily what they've done before,” Schroeder said of what has made Ubisoft SF successful so far.

“We want to continue challenging ourselves and take on new genres. Right now we're already starting up the next AAA project here. And yes, it will be a different genre. It's not a music game, it's not an RPG,” Higo teased.

Higo and Schroeder couldn’t offer any more concrete details, but they did mention the AAA game project comes from an idea the team began looking into before taking on South Park.

“If we're just making something that other studios are perfectly capable of churning out, it's not going to work for us. We have to be different,” Higo said. “So we have to have that different edge to it, a different take on it.

Jonathon Dornbush is an Associate Editor for IGN, and he can't stop playing the pooping minigame in The Fractured But Whole. Talk to him about it on Twitter @jmdornbush.